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It plays movies, videos, music and photo slideshows, all in a single, handheld device with a 20GB hard disk. Creative's new Zen Portable Media Centre (PMC) is made possible by Microsoft's Portable Media Centre operating system, based on its Windows Mobile platform. Think of it as a hardware incarnation of Windows Media Player. The Zen PMC is the first such product for Microsoft to show off its new platform, but others will follow shortly.

The interface is simple and elegant with a single Windows button to call up the main menu, presenting the option of the type of media you'd like to play. Customising settings are kept to a minimum and limited mainly to equaliser and display options. Everything else is simple.

The Zen PMC connects to a PC using USB 2.0 and requires the latest Windows XP-only Microsoft Media Player 10.0 to transfer files. You can set it to synchronise content automatically upon connection or manually transfer individual files. Although it is promoted as a portable movie player, you are limited to videos you've made yourself or movies downloaded through the internet. Ripping DVDs for transfer to the PMC would technically be illegal, so it's not a direct competitor to portable DVD players in that sense.

If you have a TV tuner card, you can record programs and transfer these to the player. Downloading video to the Zen can be incredibly slow, depending on the format, as it converts these on the fly into something readable by the player. Playback, however, is impressive. The PMC can handle fast-action motion with relative smoothness onscreen.

The display is a 10cm LCD panel, which unfortunately is too reflective for outdoor use. The biggest weakness, though, is that for a portable device it's too large and heavy (340g) to fit into your average pocket.